The continued growth and popularity of the Internet and company Intranets and Extranets as sources of information has resulted to information explosion to users. This has lead to a demand from users for finding ways to easily search and share relevant information they are looking for. Typically, when a user is looking for information from Internet on a particular subject he or she will use public search engines such as Google or Yahoo Search. In order to share his or her search findings or topic of interests she or he often uses social bookmark sharing services like del.icio.us or furl.net. In case of company Intranet or Extranet search, the user often uses company's internal search engine and internal social bookmarking services.
The term user in this context can mean a human user who makes manual searches and content bookmarking or a machine-based user that can be for instance a process that makes automatic searches and automatic content bookmarking after an alarm has occurred in an industrial process.
Generally speaking a search engine is a program that performs a search based on user search query (e.g. keyword(s) or phrase) and sends the search results back to the user. These result lists typically include a listing of hyperlinks for the web pages or other documents produced by the search and additional information such as an excerpt of the text on the page, which relates to the keywords entered by the user for the search and the file type of the result document. Techniques, such as Boolean query language, may be used to create a search phrase and limit and narrow down the number of search hits.
In some cases the search listing contains visual presentations (also known as thumbnails) of the web pages, still images and first/multiple frames of the video content. In case of Web (HTML) document thumbnails, the rectangular upper part of HTML pages are rendered into bitmap graphics and resized in order to create visual abstracts of the pages. It is well known to those skilled in the art that rendering means processing a document for visual representation. The rendering engine of the web browser essentially processes format instructions and converts them into graphical elements, determines the layout and calculates the overall appearance of the document. The thumbnail presentation may work fine for the web documents if the content length is sufficiently small, fitting into standard screen size, aspect ratio and resolution. This content is then scaled according to thumbnail dimensions, providing a very high-level preview of the web page.
Social bookmarking is generally understood as a method to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of meta-data. Typically in a social bookmarking system users have means to save URL's of the web pages she or he wants to share with other users. These bookmarks can be shared publicly or privately only with specified people or groups. Many social bookmarking services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags or folders, or a combination of folders and tags. The thumbnail presentation of the web pages described in previous section would improve the user experience of organizing bookmark folders and viewing them.
However, a single thumbnail presentation and conventional URL based bookmarking is not practical for documents containing multiple pages i.e. paginated content such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint or PDF documents. In some cases the same applies with long HTML documents like web blogs, which often contain textual content worth tens of pages when paginated for printing or view-per-page purposes.
In case of searching and sharing multi-page documents visual accuracy and capability to re-produce the original layout characteristics is one of the key features for good user experience. The rendering process and the original document should follow the document specific pagination as closely as possible. The process should produce previews from the original document following the appropriate pagination logic, creating at least one new representation for each page or slide of the document. If the document is a long HTML page it would be beneficial if the process has logic to paginate the content to a printable format. The system should also have capability to bookmark these paginated previews for content sharing purposes.
Paginated document previews help end-users to judge relevancy of the document content during the search activity. These previews also provide a powerful tool for sharing interesting content as a part of the social bookmarking service. They provide instant access to relevant and interesting parts of the document. If the service would also enable the end-users to create, organize and tag shared folders from preview pages one could significantly improve accessibility and discoverability of information content previously hidden within multi-page documents or long HTML pages such as blogs. In addition it would help other users to faster access and use content findings their peers and other subject experts have previously made and defined as valuable, worthy for sharing with others.